A Confession

Summary

A Confession is Leo Tolstoy's short spiritual autobiography, written in 1879–1880, when he was about fifty and already world-famous as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It tells how a man who had everything the world admires lost all sense of why he was living, and how he found his way back to faith in God. Tolstoy begins with his childhood in the Orthodox Church and explains that by eighteen he no longer believed what he had been taught. He describes the vanity of his years as a young officer and celebrated writer, his faith in "progress", and the shocks that shook it, among them a public execution he witnessed in Paris and the death of his brother. Then, in the midst of a happy family life and literary success, he was stopped by questions he could not answer: why live, and what will come of my whole life? He searched the sciences and philosophy and found that the wisest teachers, from Solomon in Ecclesiastes to Socrates, the Buddha and Schopenhauer, only confirmed that life without an answer to these questions is vanity. He retells the Eastern fable of a traveler hanging in a well above a dragon while mice gnaw at the twig that holds him, and he confesses that the thought of ending his own life haunted him for a time. The turning point comes when he looks beyond the educated people of his own class to the millions of ordinary working people who live and die in faith. He concludes that faith is what makes life possible, that the meaninglessness he felt belonged to his own idle way of life, and that "to know God and to live is one and the same thing." He returns to the Orthodox Church, keeping its fasts and receiving communion. In the last chapters he describes his growing difficulty with some of the church's teachings and practices and resolves to examine them; a short dream, added in 1882, closes the book with an image of being held up by faith. Tolstoy's later views went far beyond this book: he rejected much Orthodox doctrine and was excommunicated in 1901. A Confession nonetheless remains one of the most honest accounts ever written of a modern man's despair and his search for God.

Top Lessons

• The question that success cannot answer

  Tolstoy had fame, wealth and a happy family, and still could not say why he should live. The book teaches that the deepest human questions are not settled by achievement, and that taking them seriously is the beginning of wisdom.

• Faith as the strength of life

  Tolstoy concludes that every person who lives believes in something, and that faith is what gives a finite life meaning in relation to the infinite. He comes to see that his reasoning had left God out and so could only end in despair.

• Learning from humble believers

  Tolstoy, the great intellectual, learns the meaning of life from peasants, pilgrims and monks. Their patience in labor, suffering and death shows him the faith he had lost.

• For the Christian reader

  A Confession can be read beside Ecclesiastes and Augustine's Confessions: like the Preacher, Tolstoy finds all things under the sun to be vanity, and like Augustine he finds rest only in God. Readers should also know that Tolstoy later rejected the divinity of Christ, the creeds and the sacraments of the church; his story of returning to faith is genuine, but it does not end in orthodox belief, and the book invites careful, charitable discernment.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Tolstoy describes what would now be called a severe depression in mid-life: loss of meaning and pleasure, a sense that life is a 'stupid and spiteful joke', and suicidal thoughts that he resisted. William James used the book as a case of 'the sick soul'. Any reading of it as a diagnosis is interpretive; Tolstoy himself understood it as a spiritual crisis.

• Chapter IV

  The 'arrest of life': questions he cannot answer and his struggle against the thought of suicide.

• Chapter V

  The Eastern fable of the traveler in the well, with the dragon below and the mice gnawing the twig.

• Chapter XII

  Recovery of the will to live through faith in God.